POMEPS is delighted to kick off our new “Summer Reading” series with POMEPS Steering Committee member Jillian Schwedler, professor of political science at Hunter College, CUNY. We asked Schwedler, whose research focuses on social movements and contentious politics, to share a few books on her summer reading list and here’s what she had to say:
Some of the most innovative work on Middle East politics in recent years has been approaching familiar topics — regimes, power, repression, economic exclusions, and ideology — from a range of new perspectives: “new” in that they shift our attention away from questions about robust authoritarianism, democratic transitions, and social movements. Three very important books published in recent years exemplify this new body of literature and are, in my opinion, sure to become “must reads”:
- Paul Amar’s The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Duke University Press, 2013).
- Lara Deeb and Mona Harb’s Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut (Princeton University Press, 2013).
- Laleh Khalili’s Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford University Press, 2012).
— Jillian Schwedler, Hunter College, CUNY